Lunchmeat

Lunch Meat (1987)

The story here is very simple and straightforward with a group of crazy cannibal hillbillies ambushing some city folk. The city folk consist of a truckload of teenagers (I think they are supposed to be teens) that are off to party or something. They have the misfortune of being ambushed by a family of cannibal rednecks that want to turn them into supper! You basically have Pa, a sort of giant behemoth of a son that is kind of retarded, and two other brothers that serve as comic relief. After the ambush the survivors take off into the woods with the family in hot pursuit. But instead of just letting themselves be killed they start to fight back and give the hunters all they can handle.

Lunch Meat is one of those movies that I kept meaning to rent back in the day. The cover to the VHS is one that I remember looking at again and again. It is sort of funny that it was more than 20 years later before I actually sat down to watch it. I have to say that I was kind of impressed with the movie. It starts off kind of slow and really doesn’t work for me when we it tries to introduce the teenagers and give them some back-story. But every time the hillbilly family is on screen the movie picks up. The movie really works best during the extended chase sequence that dominates the last half of the runtime. You have the characters in constant motion, all the kills happen during the chase, and there are some decent one-liners that had me laughing a bit.

What really surprised me was how well Lunch Meat was made. The picture and sound are decent for a movie made on the cheap like Lunch Meat was. There are a couple scenes where the wind noise was whipping across the microphone, which really annoys me. But for the most part the movie is very solidly made. There area few too many POV shots early on, but after a while the filmmakers get away from that. The gore is plentiful and the kills are quite sticky. But the execution of the effects stuff isn’t great. Though for me the quantity and glee that the severed arms and kills are executed make up for any lack in skill.

Stacked up against most of the other low budget movies that I’ve seen from the direct to video era of the 1980s Lunch Meat is one of the better ones. Now this isn’t the kind of movie that I will watch again and again. But it does a decent enough job that I can recommend it as an oddity to watch on an off night when you want to kill 90 or so minutes. The biggest problem that I have with Lunch Meat is the lack of a DVD release. This leaves most of us searching for a VHS copy, which can fetch a pretty penny. I can’t imagine spending 20 or 30 bucks for the VHS of the movie. But if you can find it cheap I do recommend it.

2 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer